Lepidoptery Review – Is a review better than word of moth?

A review copy of Lepidoptery was sent to me by New Mill Industries. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Lepidoptery is the scientific study of moths and butterflies, and this is a review of a game of the same name. Amazingly, perhaps, this isn’t the first butterfly-related game I’ve covered here. That honour goes to Mariposas, and you can read that review here. This is a very different beast. The winged creatures are much more abstracted in David Karesh & Srinivas Vasudevan’s game of shedding and ladder climbing. While it might be different, it’s the more approachable and arguably more enjoyable butterfly game of the two.

In Lepidoptery, each player has a deck of identical cards featuring illustrations of moths and butterflies. On the table, there’s a display of cards which aim to emulate a Connect 4 board. Playing the game itself is very easy, but combining that with tactical play to fill the Connect 4 area is tricky, and it adds a welcome layer of strategy which prevents it from becoming Just Another Shedder. Below the Connect 4 area are spaces where each player places a token. Each space has the name of one of the combinations of cards you can play on your turn: single card, pair, three of a kind, a run of two, or a run of three.

Playing your cards is super easy, as long as you follow the two most important rules. Firstly, you cannot play the same combination as your previous turn. So if you played a pair on your previous turn, you have to play anything but a pair on your current turn. Secondly, you have to beat the combination on the table that the other player just played. Beating a combination is making sure that the lowest value card in your combination is higher than the lowest card already on the table, or that the lowest number matches and that there are more cards in your combo.

The extra layer of fun comes in each and every time you play cards in front of you. If, for example, you play a pair of cards then you take one of your player tokens and ‘drop’ it in from the top of the column marked ‘Pair’. Just like taking one of your big plastic discs in a game of Connect 4 and dropping it in the top of the frame. If you can’t play (or choose not to, it’s not a must-play game) you refresh your hand back up to 12 cards, and the other player does the same.

If you can make a straight line of four of your tokens in the display, be it horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, you win. Likewise, if you manage to shed your entire 38-card deck, you win. In the same way the best games do, Lepidoptery gets the rules overhead out of the way and instead lets you concentrate on what you want to do, and how you want to do it, instead of trying to remember how the game works on a mechanical level. When a game does this well – and Lepidoptery does this well – it makes a good game a joy to play.

Final thoughts

Lepidoptery is another game from the New Mill Industries stable, and it continues their excellent pedigree. On the surface, it’s a simple game. A game of shedding and beating the combination on the table, just like games like Scout (read my review of Scout here). So why bother when games like Scout already exist? For a game to succeed in a crowded market, it needs to stand on its own two feet. Butterflies have six feet, which is surely cheating, but it works. The Connect 4 display and win condition is a simple idea, but it works so well.

Thematically, there’s nothing there at all, really. The rulebook mentions that the two of you are aiming to put together the best displays of your winged insects, but it never feels like it. After all, the ‘display’ you’re completing are just some cards which ends up with a bunch of tokens on it. It might have been different if your butterflies and moths had ended up forming some kind of tableau, but they don’t. Don’t get me wrong, the illustrations on the cards are really cute, and it’s great having the Latin names on them, but it doesn’t affect the game. If the cards just had numbers on them, the game would be the same.

I guess it’s a feather in Lepidoptery’s winged cap when the only negative thing I can really find to speak about is the theme. It’s not alone when it comes to that level of criticism, though. I don’t feel badly towards it in the same way I don’t feel like I’m putting on a circus performance in the Oink version of Scout, or taking a walk in the rain in Watashi Dake no Seiten. If you like card shedders and ladder climbing games, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Lepidoptery just as much as I have. It’s a cracking two-player game that’s different enough to warrant a place in your collection.

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